dkirschner's Ballpoint Universe - Infinite (PC)

[May 10, 2015 08:06:06 PM]

I think this was in a Humble Bundle that I picked up for something else, though I remember being intrigued by the pen-drawn visuals and the similarity (I had assumed) to the Limbos and Closures of the indie world.

Turns out Ballpoint Universe isn't much like Limbo or Closure at all! The regular world is sort of, where you walk around in the pretty 2-d environments and talk to NPCs and get missions from them. There is some platforming that I disliked because the controls were difficult. Move the mouse to the left of the screen for Doodle to walk left, and right for right. But the majority of the game is actually a shoot 'em up, which came out of left field.

Luckily, the shooting em up is pretty fun. There are a ton of upgrades for your ship, which you unlock by getting ink from slain enemies. Each mission has 3 ratings, and you get bonus ink for each one, so it's good to replay them a few times to get better rankings and earn some more ink for upgrades. Enemies are varied, if simplistic. The game cannot be accused of being difficult.

After roughly 1/3 of the story, I figured out a win button combo of ship equipment. I just used a melee weapon and a shield for the latter 2/3 of the game and stomped every level. I eventually upgraded to the best shield in the game, but I was just using like the second melee weapon! So I would just fly around whacking enemies and deflecting all their projectiles. The last shield even deflects enemies that get too close to you. It was like near-invincibility.

I went back and got perfect on a bunch of the missions for some achievements and more ink to play with some of the other weapons. I burned through like 30 levels of Infinite mode (just waves of enemies through at least wave 60).

Yeah, all in all, it was a fun way to spend a few hours.
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dkirschner's Ballpoint Universe - Infinite (PC)

Current Status: Finished playing

GameLog started on: Sunday 10 May, 2015

GameLog closed on: Sunday 10 May, 2015

dkirschner's opinion and rating for this game

Pretty fun shoot-em-up. Really neat visual style and a good soundtrack. Controls for flying were good, but for the Doodle sucked. So hard to jump accurately!